[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Progress indicator

[Aurélien Gâteau]

On Tuesday 09 July 2013 22:40:41 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 9. Juli 2013, 22:04:56 schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
> >> * Show progress regarding contentual steps.
> >
> >I don't think the word "contentual" exists. What did you mean?
> 
> Download of two files, one 1GB the other 1kB: don't show #files but #kB.
> 
> >> * Don't use waiting bars (aka marquee style).
> >
> >I'm not sure what you mean by "waiting bar". You mean the one that looks
> >like a progress bar but just continuously moves to show that the
> >application does not know when it's finished?
> 
> Yes. Left - right, right - left. It's IMHO just a simple animation.

Knight Rider! :)
> 
> >I agree that those are bad for the user experience, but we need to suggest
> >an alternative for when we can't really tell the progress because we don't
> >know the overall amount of work yet (i think vastly inaccurate progress
> >bars are even worse than "waiting bars").
> >Do you know a better way to visualize an indefinite busy state?
> 
> I would demand to know the total progress. But if really necessary, a busy
> pointer (aka spinning wheel) is okay. An example: you connect to a site to
> download the two file mentioned above. The time until handshake is done
> depends on #prism and other unknown delayers, so it's neccessary to
> indicate that we wait (and still hope for a connection). But it's better to
> run the download in background which makes progress indication dispensable.

kdelibs comes with some kind of spinner: animated rotating dots around a 
circle.

Aurélien